A zillion great ideas from the Customer Service is the New Marketing conference.
- Wesabe’s CEO answers his own phone and the phone number is on the public support site. People call all the time to see if it’s real – then get so surprised that they hang up when he answers. It’s a huge confidence-builder for new customers.
- Let the community help itself. There is no more cost-effective service than customer-to-customer service.
- Communicate MORE when things are going wrong. Use a blog that is hosted somewhere else so you have a way to communicate if your site goes down.
- The average employee doesn’t spend their time handling business process. They handle exceptions to business process. How do you prepare them?
- Find customers who support other customers (like those people who voluntarily answer questions in the forums). Support those people. Give them knowledge, attention, recognition, and gratitude.
- Enlist the community to help moderate, edit, and improve. Do they have the tools?
- When you email a customer-satisfaction survey, if anyone checks “unhappy” — immediately and automatically page your senior service team and your CEO to get it fixed on the spot.
- Surveys with open-text question are hard to compile, so companies avoid them. What should you do with all that messy data? Read it and learn!
- Customers who are great contributors are doing it for their own reasons, not yours. Figure out what motivates them.
- Get smaller as you grow. Break customer service into smaller and smaller teams focused on supporting very specific segments.
From the panel “Scaling Customer Service”
- Marc Hedlund, Wesabe
- Heather Champ, Flickr
- Frederick Mendler, Rackspace
- Ross Mayfield, SocialText
- Pratap Penumalli, Google